Traditionally, a sender delivers documents to a remote recipient through mail services, such as a postal service or a mail courier. However, these are slow and costly methods of delivery. To reduce delivery time, senders began using facsimile machines to send documents. This method however is also costly, ties up telephone lines, and can be particularly slow for large documents. In some cases, the document sizes are limited by the facsimile machine's memory space. With the advent of the Internet, documents are now predominately sent through email, which is faster and less expensive than the other methods. However, email delivery can be a problem, particularly for large documents, because email memory space is limited. Moreover, the email recipient must access the recipient's electronic mailbox, open the document, and then print it on the recipient's local printer, all of which take valuable time.
To avoid these problems, there is a need in the art for an inexpensive and fast method for remote document delivery.